Drupal: Simple, flexible Web Publishing

The Internet has made publishing on a global scale almost effortless. That's the rhetoric, anyway. The truth is more complicated, because the Internet provides only a means of distribution; a would-be publisher still needs a publishing tool. A decade ago, people who wanted such a tool had three choices, all bad: a cheap but inflexible system, a versatile but expensive one, or one written from scratch. What was needed was something in the ­middle, requiring neither enormous expense nor months of development--not a single application, but a platform for creating custom publishing environments. For tens of thousands of sites and millions of users, that something is Drupal.

Created as an open-source project by Dries Buytaert, Drupal is a free content management framework--a tool for building customized websites quickly and easily, without sacrificing features or stability. Site owners can choose from a list of possible features: they might, say, want to publish ­articles, offer each user a profile and a blog, or allow users to vote or comment on content. All these features are optional, and most are independent of the others.
With Drupal's high degree of individualization, users can escape cookie-cutt er tools without investing in completely custom- made creations, which can be time- consuming, costly, and hard to maintain. The Howard Dean presidential campaign used Drupal in 2004, and today it's used by Greenpeace U.K., the humor magazine the Onion, Nike's Beijing Olympics site, and MTV U.K., among many others.

The diversity of its users has led to many improvements, Buytaert says: "The size, passion, and velocity of the Drupal community makes incredible things happen." There are tens of thousands of active Drupal installations worldwide. Thousands of developers have contributed to the system's core, and more than 2,000 plug-ins have been added by outside contributors.
Buytaert began the work that became Drupal in 2000, when he was an undergraduate at the University of Antwerp. He had a news site called Drop.org, and he needed an internal message board to host discussions. After reviewing the existing options for flexible message boards, Buytaert decided he could write a better version from scratch.

The original version of Drupal (its name derives from the Dutch for droplet) worked well enough to attract additional users, who proposed new features. Within a year, Buytaert decided to make the project open source. He released the code in January 2001 as version 1.0.

Since open-source projects tend to attract expert users, they often lack clear user interfaces and readable documentation, making them unfriendly to mere mortals. But Buytaert understood from the beginning how important usability is to the cycle of improvement, adoption, and more improvement that drives the development of open-source software. The core Drupal installation comes with voluminous help files. The central team regularly polls users as well as developers (which is unusual in an open-source project) to decide what to improve next. The process reveals not just features to add, but ones to remove, and ways to make existing features easier to understand. For example, the project's website has been redesigned to help people new to Drupal figure out how to get up and running.

Buytaert has also founded a company, Acquia, to offer support, service, and custom development for Drupal users, especially businesses. He calls Acquia "my other full-time job" and likens it to Linux distributor Red Hat, which provides custom packaging and support for its version of the open-source operating system.

With Drupal version 7, due later this year, Buytaert hopes to include technologies that will make sites running Drupal part of the Semantic Web, Tim Berners- Lee's vision for making online data understandable to machines as well as people. If Drupal hosts a website containing a company's Securities and Exchange Commission profile, for example, other sites could access just the third-quarter revenues, without having to retrieve the whole profile. The goal of sharing data in smaller, better-defined chunks is to make Drupal a key part of the growing eco system of websites that share structured data. If this effort succeeds, it will ensure Drupal's continued relevance to the still-developing Web.

By Clay Shirky
Published in the October issue of Technology Review #35

Introducing: Marc Robinsone Nicholas Caballero

These days, it's a rare occasion to come across someone that shows any genuine passion for personal and cultural values. It's an even rarer occasion that this person happens to be a developer willing to work for a startup with no funding and no big-name supporters.

But then again, Marc Robinsone Nicholas Caballero isn't your typical developer–he's a humanist, an eminent pedagogue, and a courageous supporter of free and open source software. It would be a massive understatement to say that we're excited to have Marc on our team.

Marc joins ONE-EARTH.com at a critical juncture. After several months of literally searching all over the world for potential developers to fill this position, we're confident we found the right person. Under our guidance, Marc will help take the site into beta stage; a task that we believe only Marc is capable of carrying out because of his unique education, skill set, and undeterred passion.

Marc is proud to declare his home in the metropolis of Makati–the Philippine's business district. He was born and raised in Baliuag, a first-class municipality in the province of Bulacan, Philippines. After graduating Magna Cum Laude from Asia Pacific College in 2007, he had the opportunity to follow many of his colleagues and classmates overseas to Japan, Korea, Dubai, London, or the US to pursue a financially better career. But Marc had other plans. Instead of leaving the Philippines, he chose to stay and has since become a role model for his generation, inspiring many to believe that there is hope in a better future at "home."

When he's not balancing multiple jobs in Information Technology (IT) and Graphic Design, Marc hosts software workshops and seminars for the youth and elderly to help them adapt to the fast pace of IT (the Philippines is approximately five years behind the US).

We share Marc's passion and beliefs. We're very happy to welcome him to our team.

collaboratively written by,
Steven, Founder and CEO
Thomas, Technology Leader
Nicholas, Marketing Visualization Coordinator

A Symbol of Power

It's official. One Earth Network, Inc. trademarked its logo: click here and search for “77130606” to read the details about the classes we filed and how we may use it in commerce.

Some of you may be saying “hey, that looks a lot like the Power Symbol on my mac.” You’re right; and we’re currently looking into ways we can exploit electronics manufacturers around the world. Of course, if did win a legal case, we’d gladly share the money we were awarded. We’ll keep you posted.

All joking aside, getting this logo trademarked is a big deal. We filed with the USPTO two years ago and spent countless hours going back-and-forth with our assigned attorney. The process is finally over...and with success. Now we can put the "TM" next to the logo on everything we do and begin to build our brand around the design. We also trademarked the slogan "Local Solutions for a Global Problem", and we're considering trademarking "An Index of the World's Environmental Solutions."

History
No one has been able to determine the origins of the Power Symbol, but many suspect it was derived from the binary code, 1 (meaning on) and 0 (meaning off). The Power Symbol, in all of its forms, has an interesting history.

Meaning
The concept of the One Earth logo has a different meaning. For starters, the logo is a direct visual representation of our name. Simultaneously, the "1" represents all living- and non-living things viewed individually, while the "0" represents all living- and non-living things viewed collectively. This ancient view of our world–a constant flux of individuality and collectivity–is at the heart of One Earth. It's a paradox that must be understood to achieve sustainability. Think about yourself, yet think about those around you. By doing so, we strengthen ourselves and become one–there is no greater goal.

collaboratively written by,

Steven, Founder and CEO

Thomas, Technology Leader

Nicholas, Marketing Visualization Coordinator

First of Many Posts

It's about time we created a 'progress' blog for one-earth.com...

First of all, thanks to the sixteen people who wrote articles for one-earth.com. They turned out great and we're excited about seeing them on the site when it launches.

Thomas is working extremely hard at managing the developers and ensuring that we're on target to launch by October 13. Tomorrow, we're beginning a new phase of development with a new development team, which we hope will be able to wrap up the site development on time and on budget.

Structurally, the site is complete. Check it out here; looking at the way the site is organized, you can see why we refer to it as a "craigslist for environmentalists." We have a few major features to add and few minor design tweaks and we'll be finished. One of the major features we'll be adding is the ability for users to save actions, businesses, organizations, etc., just like delicious.com allows you to save your favorite web sites. It'll be a convenient way for everyone to save and share their favorite actions, businesses, and organizations.

Last month, Nick filmed and edited an intro video for the homepage, which will help visitors understand the purpose and function of the site (in case it isn't completely obvious already). Thanks to Lila and Hired Gun for making it possible. When the site gets closer to the launch, we'll post it.

collaboratively written by,

Steven, Founder and CEO

Thomas, Technology Leader

Nicholas, Marketing Visualization Coordinator